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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#371

Post by warp_factor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #367
yzmtf2008 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them. You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, some people quite enjo…

Many people enjoy candy too, doesn't mean it's good for you. Not everyone is a software engineer, but everyone has limited attention. Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitaskin…

you put it better than I did in my initial post. They managed to hack that reward part of the brain with immediate interaction at the expense of deep meaningful work that require long periods of reflection before producing anything.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#372

Post by vhab »

warp_factor wrote: post #351

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lo…

> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an "attention driven" work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.

I see where you're coming from. But anecdote time.

The immediate communication fixed something for us which would previously be a more disruptive tap on the shoulder, or alternatively an only once a day processed e-mail. Slack gave our devs time to finish their thought, write out that line of code, before tabbing to Slack to see what's up.

Because you see, I love my team, but they're not perfect. Just like the vast majority of people they're imperfect beings working with imperfect information. And in order to get them to output quality code (as in, does what it needs to do, bug free, without incorrect assumptions about data) they need to communicate to each other and me. We can't wait until a PR to catch they didn't fully understand these data models setup by another guy. Nor can we wait until a PR to realize someone took the wrong approach trying to fix a problem.

Someone getting disrupted might mean someone else can progress with their task. What I'm trying to get at, I need my team to communicate and communicate often. We have plenty of issues, just like any team, but most of them come from the lack of communication. Slack, or any other similar platform allowed to strike somewhat of a happy medium where the barrier to communicate isn't too high nor too low. It's less formal and faster than an email. And keeps a better log than an in-person conversation would.

Added bonus, it also helps us to have a more liberal 'work from home' policy.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#373

Post by cush »

yzmtf2008 wrote: post #354
warp_factor wrote: post #351

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lo…

> So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them. You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, some people quite enjo…

> not everyone is a software engineer

It's sad you have to point this out. What works for a some might not for a dev.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#374

Post by cush »

neumann wrote: post #314
CameronBanga wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s pretty great, and comes with a lot of great tools that no unicorn has found a way to replace.

It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning. - Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobo…

You're describing 12 months ago Teams. It's come a long way.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#375

Post by debatem1 »

lallysingh wrote: post #291
debatem1 wrote: post #58

There is no way Slack is worth $16 billion dollars. That's over 40x current revenue for a company that lost almost $400,000 a day last year.

Dude, when you see the valuations of other unicorns you're gonna be soo pissed...

Well, you aren't wrong. But I think there are unicorns that are good investments, particularly cloudflare and juul. There are other unicorns I view as highly speculative but potentially viable. But slack? No way. Not at this valuation. If it ever makes this much money, let alone this much profit, I'll eat a hat.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#376

Post by baybal2 »

hilbertseries wrote: post #319
baybal2 wrote: post #16

It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity. This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales

Slack made 140m in the first quarter of this year, their valuation is based on how fast they've grown their business and how fast it continues to grow. They don't sell ads, they sell seats, they're a SAAS company. 16B is not insane for a company that has grown revenue at their pace and continues to grow revenue.

They don't make money on the prime majority of their users, nor the bills for slack are particularly high. The digits simply don't make sense there.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#377

Post by markmark »

scarface74 wrote: post #137

They will be “successful” once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven’t proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.

They could be profitable tomorrow by decreasing their advertising spend. Their current customers are absolutely profitable, they're just choosing to use some of that money investors are throwing at them to keep growing.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#379

Post by pferde »

astrange wrote: post #252
rayiner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A chat client that takes multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM and sucks battery life prodigiously should be, if not illegal, at the very least a violation of unwritten international norms.

It's actually not the first to do this. Adium (AIM) and Colloquy (IRC) switched to WebKit theming in the 2000s, when computers were /really/ too slow to run it.

Oh wow. Now that should be illegal.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#380

Post by liopleurodon »

henning wrote: post #307
loeg wrote: post #302

It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can reall…

Hipchat was horrible. Barely worked. Flaky. Was happy when my company switched to Slack
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